Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

May 31, 2009

This week's issue of Businessweek has a solid article about how Yahoo! is trying to avoid a repeat of its China mistakes in Vietnam. Yahoo! 360 is very popular among Vietnamese bloggers, but Yahoo! has decided not to host the service out of Vietnam, opting instead to host the Vietnamese Yahoo! 360 in Singapore. Yahoo!, along with Google and Microsoft, is a member of the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder initiative launched last Fall aimed at upholding principles of free expression and privacy in the Internet and telecommunications industries. All three corporate signatories are now applying the GNI principles to decisions they make about operations not only in Vietnam, but in many other markets. In South Korea, after a law recently went into effect requiring the collection of users' real names and ID numbers, and handover of user information to the South Korean government upon request, Google chose to disable video uploads and comments on the Korean version of YouTube, recommending that South Korean users use other international versions of YouTube - not subject to South Korean jurisdiction - instead.

It has been more than half a year since the Global Network Initiative on free expression and privacy was launched with somefanfare as well as some criticism. The main headline: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft made a public commitment to free expression and privacy, signing on to a set of common principles and agreeing to be held accountable through a system of reporting, evaluation and monitoring. I've been involved with the process of forming GNI since 2006. It wasn't easy: it took a year before the participants were even ready to admit publicly that they were sitting down together with human rights groups, free speech activists, socially responsible investment funds, and academics to create a set of principles which they would then be held accountable for upholding. Now the big challenge is to recruit more companies. The organization's structure is still being set up, and the search for an executive director is underway. The GNI is beginning to issue public statements: In March the group expressed concern about lack of transparency and accountability in the way that various governments around the world have been censoring YouTube. The GNI more recently reiterated the commitment of participating companies to "continue to take steps to minimize the impact on users and the public and to encourage governments to protect the right to freedom of expression."

Since the initiative's launch, GNI members have discussed the organization and its objectives in several public fora. At the bottom of this post I've embedded the video from a GNI panel at a Berkeley conference on human rights, technology and new media. Watch it for a discussion of the initiative's goals, activities, and motivations in great detail. Last Wednesday I moderated a panel about GNI at the 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference held at UPenn. It was live-blogged by Ethan Zuckerman and by Lokman Tsui. Conversations leading to the GNI's formation were motivated in large part by the fact that the three participating companies were hauled in to congress and yelled at in February 2006 for their roles - to various degrees - in complying with Chinese government demands for censorship and surveillance. But all members of the GNI (including myself) insist that while its formation may have been spurred by events in China, this is a truly global initiative: there is no country on earth where companies aren't under some kind of pressure from government to do things that infringe on individual civil liberties. The GNI is meant to be a set of global guidelines for how to handle these pressures - from China to the U.S. to anywhere in between.

That said, the GNI panel at last Wednesday's Chinese Internet Research Conference was a great opportunity to get feedback from Chinese bloggers, activists, academics, and others. Isaac Mao talked about his open letter to Google , written two years ago but never responded to. He believes that global companies should do more than just try to minimize harm: he argued that they could do more to actively help to support an independent discourse on the Chinese Internet. They are already doing some things, like enabling https on Google Reader, Google Docs, and so forth, but he believes they could do more to make their blogging tools accessible, and to help China's independent bloggers support themselves through Google Adsense. When asked whether he thought that the GNI was too much of a "Western" thing, he responded that the values it espouses are universal. He did express concern however that the structure of GNI seems to be geared towards large companies, and wondered whether startups had the staff or capacity to join.

"Michael Anti" (real name: Zhao Jing), the blogger who was censored by Microsoft back in late 2005, was also in the room. I called on him to comment. He said that even though he was unhappy with Microsoft for having deleted his blog, he disagreed with human rights groups who believe that Western internet companies should pull out of China in order to avoid all compromise. "Chinese civil society really depends on Google services," he said. Without Google groups, docs, gmail, and so forth, he believes it would be even harder for people to discuss things the government doesn't want discussed. That said, however, like Isaac, Michael believes that Western companies owe it to Chinese Internet users to help them out as much as possible. His message to companies: "When you do business in China, we exchange our freedom to help you succeed. You should do something for us in return because we have chosen to ignore your compromise with the government." Both he and Isaac believe that in the long run these companies will be rewarded with Chinese users' respect and loyalty. Google's Bob Boorstin seemed to be taking it all on board. He did point out that Google Grants (in-kind advertising for non-profit organizations) are now available in China.

Ang Peng-hwa of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore observed that while the Chinese are not "genetically predisposed to censor" it would also be unrealistic to expect that the whole world will adopt an American-style "first amendment:" different societies are going to arrive at different balances between civil liberty protections and the desire to maintain stability and security, and fight crime. That said, he also thinks that a global initiative supporting free expression is worthy, because in countries that censor heavily, civil society is weak making home-grown initiatives difficult if not impossible. But global efforts need to be done in a realistic way. He suggested that the GNI might want to emphasize the issue of third party liability: in some countries (like the U.S.) web services that host blogs, wikis, and other user-generated content aren't held legally liable for content posted by their users, making it harder for governments to force them to censor. In places like China (and many other countries), companies are held responsible for everything their users upload. Focusing on best-practice legal frameworks may be less ideologically explosive and easier to discuss in countries where terms like "free speech" are ideologically loaded.

A big weakness of the GNI, as members themselves have acknowledged, is that so far only American companies have joined. The hope is to recruit European and Asian companies over the coming year. As Boorstin pointed out last week, all companies should recognize that doing good and making money are compatible. Joining GNI is a public commitment to users that you're not just going to talk the talk, but you're going to walk the walk in a transparent, accountable, and credible way.

April 23, 2005

Like many people now in their
mid-to-late 30’s, I grew up hearing a lot about “Vietnam,” the war. I was
practically born in the middle of anti-war protests in Berkeley,
California. Family legend has it I came close to being trampled by a mounted
policeman at some anti-Vietnam war demonstration. (Probably the first of several
reasons I don’t like being at demonstrations.) The first news story I can
remember was Walter Cronkite with news from the Vietnam war. I went to high
school and college with children of Vietnam war veterans and children of
Vietnamese refugees. One of my good friends in college left Vietnam with her
family as a six-year old when Saigon fell in 1975. Her parents had worked for
the South Vietnamese regime. She and her two sisters – all three of whom went to
Harvard – are brilliant and beautiful and strong-willed. “Vietnam,” has shaped
the lives of at least two generations of Americans. The last presidential
election was (ridiculously, in my view) dominated by arguments over the
candidates’ Vietnam war service records. “Vietnam” keyword searches on news
websites these days tend to turn up large numbers of stories on Iraq and U.S.
politics. We know a lot about “Vietnam,” the war and the era. We Americans know
very little about “Vietnam” in 2005, a place where more than 82 million people
now live.

Here are some of the things I learned about Vietnam:

The Vietnamese communist party is considering changing its name
to the "Labor Party," or something along those lines. Several people told me this. They’re thinking
about doing this for several reasons: First, the change would make relations
with other countries (especially the United States) less ideologiclly loaded. In
other words, Vietnam could do much to solve its “branding” problem if it stopped
calling itself “Communist” – when it is in fact better described as some kind of
socialist-capitalist hybrid nationalist-authoritarian thing. (A description that
fits China better than “communism” too… some reformers in China have also raised
the idea of changing the party’s name, but nobody seriously thinks that will
happen any time soon.) Second, the reasoning goes, the leader of Vietnam’s
revolution, Ho
Chi Minh, was primarily a nationalist anyway: communism turned out to be
the most expeditious vehicle by which to rid his country of foreign occupation.
Vietnamese who support the name change idea hope it will happen within the next
year or so. How likely is it really? Hard to say. There are plenty of old-time
war veterans in the party who don’t like the idea. And foreign diplomats and
businesspeople point out that re-branding Vietnam won’t change its diplomatic
and trade relations all that much as long as the Vietnam’s political system
remains the same and trade regulations remain too murky for foreign companies to
feel confident they’ll make money in Vietnam. But still, people I spoke with
seemed to think there’s a much greater chance of the Vietnamese Communist Party
changing its name than the Chinese. So that’s interesting.

The Generation gap is tremendous, and could cause the country to
change quickly. More than half the population is
under 30. They know nothing of war. They like Americans. You can get around
speaking in English in Hanoi in Saigon much better than in Beijing and Tokyo. At
Vietnamnet, the online newspaper
I visited, most of the employees are in their 20’s. I’m told this is common in
many Vietnamese companies. Keeping this generation under ideological control
strikes me as pretty tough. At the same time, given the amount of war and
trauma the country has been through, we can expect the country’s leaders to keep
Vietnam a one-party authoritarian state for a while. They may pull it off if
they can keep the economy growing fast enough that the young people can get
enough job opportunities and standards of living can continue to rise. (Sounds
like the Chinese government’s main challenge too…) Which is why Vietnam is
trying to get into the World Trade Organization, so it can make itself more
attractive to foreign investment. The scuttlebutt is that China wants to delay
Vietnam’s entry because that would mean more competition for investment. Which
leads us to point number three…

Many Vietnamese really don’t trust the Chinese, and see the U.S.
as an important counter-weight to Chinese power in Southeast
Asia. China occupied Vietnam in ancient times. (Many Vietnamese still revere the
Chinese sage Confucius, and burn incense to his statue in Hanoi.) The Chinese
and Vietnamese fought a border war in the early 80’s. As one Vietnamese friend
put it: “The Chinese want all their neighbors to be weak.” But the relationship
is complicated. There are factions within the Vietnamese government and party
who prefer to be close to China, and others who prefer to improve relations with
the United States. The net effect will probably be that Vietnam will play China
and the U.S. off against each other, since it certainly can’t afford to be on
bad terms with either great power.

I could have used another week to explore Vietnam, but I’ve got a bunch of
stuff going on back in Cambridge this coming week and unfortunately couldn’t
stay longer.

I went down to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City - but all the locals seem to have reverted to calling it Saigon) on Thursday to see the
Harvard-affiliated Fulbright program offering courses in economics and law to
mid-career Vietnamese professionals. My original plan was to stay in Saigon
until Friday evening, so I could have lunch with freelance journalist and
food-blogger Graham Holliday of Noodle Pie. Unfortunately, I ended up having to go back
to Hanoi early Friday morning because a meeting I had been trying to arrange came through
at the last minute for Friday afternoon. Later that day Graham blogged about the
great
noodles I missed, and succeeded in making me feel really really sorry I had
failed to meet him. Oh well. Hopefully he’ll still be in Saigon next time I go. (Photos by Graham Holiday from his NoodlePie blog.)

Friday was definitely one of those days
that you wish had been twice as long. On my way back into Hanoi from the airport
I ended up sharing a taxi with Duc Huy, who turns out to be a well known Vietnamese American
musician. He was performing in a local Hanoi club that evening and invited me to
come. I had to meet up with some people for dinner that evening, however, and
convinced them to come with me to the club, but we showed up a bit late and I
think he may already have performed. But I'm not entirely sure. We sat and watched a Vietnamese pop show
for a while, which was interesting. The place was packed with fashionably
dressed and coiffed Vietnamese 20–somethings out on the make. These kids are part of the
post-war baby boom generation who seem to have no interest in ideology and little interest in history - and look like the same fashionable young
clubbers you see from Bangkok to Taipei to Seoul. (Unfortunately cameras weren’t
allowed inside.) We saw several acts: one Vietnamese hip-hop performance
followed by a series of romantic rock ballads sung by beautiful girls and
stylish guys. Couldn't understand a word, of course, but it was interesting to watch the action in the club, where the 20-year-old hormone levels were rather high to put it mildly. A rather cute Vietnamese guy who spoke fluent German but no
English tried to pick me up, but we had no common language. Then my friends got
bored with the show and dragged me off, so I didn’t have a chance to see if Duc
Huy had actually performed yet or not, or find somebody to interpret…

Another person I would have liked to meet was blogger Geordie of OurManinHanoi, who
works for an Australian
charity, KOTO, which helps Vietnamese street kids. Oh well. Too much
to do, too little time. Geordie will be happy to know, however, that I did
managed to eat at KOTO’s restaurant before heading to the airport on Saturday.

More later with an attempt at some broader observations about Vietnam.(Technorati tag: vietnam)

April 20, 2005

This is a picture of me being interviewed live on the internet by Tuan Anh Nguyen, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Vietnamnet, an online news, information, and entertainment company.
They also have an English site. Tuan is responsible for bringing the internet to Vietnam in 1995 when he started an "unofficial" internet service - a full two years before the internet was declared legal by the Vietnamese government. After creating this fait accompli he went on to found VASC Software and Media Company, Vietnamnet's state-owned parent company which is also an internet service provider, software company, etc. Interestingly, he says that Vietnamnet doesn't make money from its PC-based web services. They make most of their money from wireless mobile applications and information services - ring tones, screensavers, information on demand, sports scores and news updates. Vietnamnet has also expanded into cable TV.

Tuan invited me to speak to his staff (average age 29) about my experiences working in Asia as a CNN correspondent, why I left CNN, and my current work on participatory media and weblogs, including the Global Voices project. Most people here haven't heard of blogs. People's mouths were hanging open when I showed them how easy it is for anybody to create a blog for free on services like blogger or blogsome.

Given that Vietnam isn't covered much by the Western media these
days, Tuan hopes that Vietnamese bloggers writing in English will be able to help outsiders understand Vietnam better. Tuan is also thinking about starting a Vietnamese language blog-hosting service. He sees blogs as the next step in Vietnam's participatory media evolution. As I wrote yesterday, Vietnamnet and some other online news sites in this country already have online forums and publish articles written by readers. The next step could be the development of blogging communities attached to news sites, enabling the professional reporters to get a better idea their audience's interests, passions and opinions by reading their blogs.

Given the political situation here, there are lots of un-touchable subjects that we can assume will remain un-touchable. But even a controlled blogosphere would do much to increase public participation in media, and would likely boost responsiveness of professional media to the interests and needs of their audiences. That would certainly be a good thing.

April 19, 2005

Here in Vietnam, debates that we’re having back in
the U.S. about journalism, media accuracy, corporate consolidaiton, credibility,
blogs and citizens’ media all seem pretty remote. But it turns out there’s more
going on below the authoritarian surface than you might think.

The Vietnamese media is state-controlled. There are no privately
owned newspapers or TV stations. They’re all owned by government or Communist
Party-controlled organizations. (Vietnamnet, a new online news service, is one exception, using
its status as new media to push the boundaries. I’ll be spending the day with
them tomorrow and will write more about them later, but they’re still subject to
the same press restrictions as all other news media.)

Since Vietnam’s Chinese-style economic reforms
started, Vietnamese journalists have more leeway than they used to have to cover
economic and social issues, but still there are a lot of topics they can’t go
near: political dissent, criticism of government leaders, many topics related to
religion and treat ment of ethnic minorities, etc. Press coverage of countries
like the U.S., Japan and China is tighly controlled to keep that coverage
consistent with official government policy.

Into this context come organizations like the World Association of
Newspapers, which has been conducting a seminar here in
Hanoi this week on newspaper management: how to boost advertising revenue and
circulation, how new technologies are changing the media markets around the
world, how to be more responsive to your audiences, etc. Of course all these things ultimately come back to fundamental issues of
content quality, the nature and purpose of journalism, and questions of what
readers actually want to read.

That’s where journalism training comes into the mix. My friend Jessica Smith is here on a program sponsored by the Knight
Foundation to help train Vietnamese journalists. Trainers don't deal with larger, more sensitive issues of the relationship between government and media, of course. But they do
promote journalistic professionalism
by focusing on things like: the importance of things like fact-checking, citing
your sources accurately, double-checking facts and figures given to you by
official sources, writing compelling headlines and leads. In other words,
they’re teaching people how to do stories that are more credible, interesting
and readable from the public’s point of view. Apparently, many young journalists
here are very responsive to this training and are eager to improve their work
because they want their work to be respected by readers and viewers. In a
state-run system where journalists are expected to be the government mouthpiece,
and whose job survival hasn’t been linked to the readibility of their stories,
there hasn’t been much incentive to do good journalism – even within the allowed
constraints.

From what I gather from talking to some Vietnamese journalists, they’d like
to be part of a more credible and commercially viable press. They want more
leeway to do more. So they welcome the training and hope that there will be more
of it.

What about grassroots media? I don’t think we’re going to see blogs emerging
as an alternative or opposition press any time soon. It wouldn’t be politically
possible for a hard-hitting alternative news blog – like Jeff Ooi’s Screenshots in Malaysia, for
instance – to emerge here. There is one Vietnam Journalism
blog run by a local journalist as a place for journalists to discuss their
profession. It’s categorized as a private site rather than a news site. But he
has to be careful about what gets posted there. As for other blogs out of
Vietnam, most are written by expats talking about their lives and travels. The
most famous is Noodlepie, devoted to food.

On the other hand, Vietnam’s MSM (mainstream media) seems quite open to using participatory
media tools to improve their content and strengthen relationships with their
audiences. VietnamNet has a section devoted to contributions from readers, along
the lines of South Korea’s OhMyNews. Today I met an editor from the country’s
most popular newspaper, Tuoi Tre, or “Youth”. He says not only do they have very
active reader discussion forums, but they also welcome readers to write articles
that get posted online and sometimes even published in the paper. People get
paid about $10–20 for stuff that gets used. The editor says that his journalists
have gotten a lot of story ideas from readers. They’re also
developing a team of editors to collaborate directly with
readers/citizen-journalists on investigative stories.

Of course, the
investigative reporting can’t go beyond certain limits without people getting
into trouble and a reporter was recently jailed for a news scoop exposing
corruption. But such teams can at least ensure that the paper’s
coverage delves into issues and stories that its readers are most passionate
about.